Role of demographics, social connectedness and prior internet experience in adoption of online shopping: Applications for direct marketing

Abstract

The use of demographics by researchers in the online shopping literature is common, however, they are typically constructed as either moderators or control factors. Little attention has been given to explicitly modelling the predictive utility of demographics. The present research models the impact of nine demographics, six social connectedness measures and five prior online experience variables on consumers’ actual online purchases. A large and representative data set was used. Our results show that a model on the basis demographic data alone explains 22.6 per cent of the variance in the consumers’ overall online shopping behaviour. The model's utility increased to 45.4 per cent once social connectedness and prior internet experience were added to the model. Furthermore, analysing 14 online product categories, we found that the predictive power of demographic variables is product specific. Overall, our results strongly support the use by practitioners of demographics as powerful predictors for direct targeting of online shoppers.